As this processing of your music collection to obtain a pleasing uniform level for you makes your listening experience that much better then thats brilliant yet I would have a few concerns.

The idea of sameness would be one.....I want to listening to music at a level the musician / group performed at when recorded. Mastering can certainly increase overall levels but thats not its main purpose.

The idea of increasing the levels on say Brian Eno's Discrete Music for example goes against the principle that the music was created by.....this is more philosophical then technical.

Ambient music generally is quiet music that often welcomes the environment it is listened in and that includes open backed headphones, obviously not closed headphones. By increase the listening levels of the music one should also turn up the sound of the environment.

Any additional conversion of the audio degrades the quality. Digital audio has no issues being copied but software will change the source material and not necessarily for the better. Analog does have and its best to convert it to digital one time after the recording is finished. Going for analog to digital and back again multiple times deteriorates the signal.

Now much of the above are mute points in the world of iTunes and Mp3 or maybe not.....Mp3 by its very nature truncates the audio file eliminating important data to get it down to a convenient package size for easy distribution. This suggest that even more attention to the recording and its various paths it takes to get to say a cd or even vinyl are paramount if something of its original quality is still available after its Mp3 strangulation....can you tell Im not a fan?

Im really old school when it comes to this and it goes back to my first high end Quad (UK manufacturer) audio system we had when I was kid.... the system was designed to get the most out of the recording as it was recorded. In other words it relied on the fact that the music was recorded and mastered to the highest standard. I still adhere to this philosophy today.

There are no words that can accurately portray the profound impact you have had on our lives. We are deeply inspired by your artistry, and your ground-breaking achievements will always inform the work we hold most closely to our hearts. You and Bob, through your distinctive styles, collaboration and friendship, have laid the foundation for our future. Your influence endures in our minds, hearts and hands as we craft tools that give rise to joyful experimentations. We will never truly capture the elegance and beauty that you and Bob achieved, but we promise to never stop trying.

From everyone at Moog, thank you for inspiring us and giving meaning to our life's work.

From Prism website...."An Over-Killer is a soft-clipping limiter to let you get more level on your digital copy by limiting the level of a balanced analogue signal to +18dBu. The OVER-KILLER, with its unique super soft clip circuit, stays soft even when large overloads are present and does not become hard like less sophisticated systems.

Bought this to consolidate my somewhat convoluted front end rig.....then cancelled the order before it shipped. This would have been more of a lateral move in sound quality. The pre amps are better than my Metric Halo uln2's but my Lavry converters (I don't use the MH uln2 converters) are perhaps a bit better then the Prism's. At this level its just swings and roundabouts...their both a lot of quality fun. Decided to stay where Im at. Came close though.

When i started I did not know it mean't that I would actually be building a synthesizer, not in a DIY manner but selecting the parts that form a complete system if thats possible with eurorack. A fair amount of choices along the way turned out to be short term as the system grew and now I feel the modular has evolved far enough.

I will never think of filters, lfo's, Sample & holds, Random generators etc...along with gates, triggers & envelopes to name a few in the same way again. Composing with a modular system liberates one from the fixed method of traditional synthesis and with that liberty comes the real challenge of sonic freedom.... you are on your own with nothing to fall back on which is both exciting and daunting.

The modular synth requires a different set of operating skills, at least for me it does...you can't approach it with past knowledge. Not acceptable. It demands that you be open and not try to conform it to your will, eventually, yes, a partnership will come into being but you have to pay you sonic dues.

The quote below really reflects what I have been suggesting and carries the main sentiment.

It is comforting to be in a situation and do what you know. You can rely on past experiences to guide you through the process, even as difficulties pop up. The challenge is making the time and space to work on what we don't know. Where the falls are harder and the successes are smaller. I'm constantly looking at the balance between what we know and what we want to learn. How do we continue to pursue new as we rely on refining what we have? What amount of resources do we apply to each? As soon as we try something for the first time we know something about it. We get the initial jitters out of the way. After that, the unknown becomes the possible. ..Chef Alex Talbot

I thought I would go into a little detail about how "Falling into Place" came about and what it has come to mean for me.

I created my soundcloud project Modular Musings this year that was sort of a sonic diary of my modular synthesizer patches: they were experiments in sound alchemy and quite exciting with some potential. APK heard the potential in them and suggested we collaborate. In a way my work was already done. It was not a project of exchanging files and recording parts in the usual sense. APK took a selection of my modular musing tracks that resonated for him and went to work using these patches as an armature to sculpt upon.

I was astonished quite a few times as this project developed.....the first was the speed and ease that APK composed his interpretation and created the musical sentiments of this work. What would have take me months or years was done in weeks. The second was how APK took my rather free floating formless pieces of music and added beautiful melodic structure as well as contributing within that structure his one experimental incantations. He is an ambient master. The third was when the final tracks of the project were ready to be auditioned: from the first few seconds of the first track I knew we had something magical and this continued with each successive piece of music. Within them was a musical lightness only possible because of the power of the darker passages etched with mystery and a balance of complex emotional elements that created a wonderful sonic maze to journey through.

My part in this collaborative project that Im honored to be a part of has been to provide a somewhat curious platform for APK to build upon......like the foundation to a skyscraper that run deep to support a gleaming structure up towards the blue.

I hope you can take a moment and give this music a listen and let us know what you think.

Not into surround sound because of lack of equipment but picked this up nevertheless.....excited to have a listen. Interesting that a large part of the music was pulled from the vaults from the Division Bell period.

Sort of interesting how Arturia started out emulating the major vintage analog synths and now their own synths are only analog I believe.....they jump right over the virtual analog....no Im wrong they have or had a synth called Origin I think filled with all their software. Word was it was pretty good.

I have often thought of picking up a Minibrute, really good little mono synth and cheap!

That video says it all....the guy is funny. Sounded really interesting just with grain effect. I loaded a few simple modular patches into omnisphere preset patch after removing the original sounds sources to use the existing modulation etc.....oh boy this is going to be fun.

Omnisphere 2 allows you to import your own audio files, so you aren't limited by the built-in library. Complaining about the GUI is purely a personal matter, and comes down to what you're comfortable with.

Have fun with it, Julio. There's so many facets to explore within that plugin that I still discover new things fairly regularly.

Thanks Mike.....the ability to import my own audio files was the reason I purchased it, that and the spirit behind the software development. Spectrasonic seem to be sonic wizards with an interest in the wonderfully strange. The hybrid nature of digital oscillators and sample and the amazing sounds that have been created That appeals to me. Now whatever oddities I craft on my modular synth I can slide that into omnisphere and evolve the sound into.....?